The Future of Petén

Richard Hansen, Director of the Mirador Basin Project and head archaeologist at El Mirador archaeological site was named Environmentalist of the Year by Latin Trade magazine.

Latin Trade today announced the winners of the Latin Trade Bravo Business Awards intended to “honor government and business leaders for their contributions to progress in Latin America.” The award puts Hansen in the company of corporate leaders such as Michael Dell of Dell computers and Craig Herkert of Wal-Mart Americas, as well as major Latin American political figures. The awards ceremony will take place on October 24 in Miami.

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the strangest things about Guatemala is how close it is to the US. And how easy to leave. In our plane, we effortlessly crossed the border where Mexico tries to keep the Guatemalans out, then cleared the wall the US is building to keep the Mexicans out. Just four and a half hours out of Guatemala City’s gleaming new airport we landed in LA.

It is jarring to move so quickly from one environment to the next. And I am reminded that this very act — the ability to move freely — has so much to do with the situation in Petén.

Petén is being shaped by politicians and conservationists who draw borders trying to redefine how people and forest products will move through the region. Petén is being shaped by narco-ranchers, invasive farmers and fire-setters who mow down the forest illegally in swaths and patches. Some are big-time landowners with political connections. Others are campesinos who have edged north one by one, seeking the parcela that they couldn’t find anywhere else. Petén is being shaped, too, by the communities rooted there who have been living off the forest for generations. Very few of the latter people could ever get on a plane and just go. Read more »

LAGUNA DEL TIGRE NATIONAL PARK, Guatemala — The sign announcing the entrance to Laguna del Tigre National Park is large and impressive. The problem is, that’s about the only visible sign that you’re entering a “core protected area” of a massive national wilderness preserve.

We traveled about five hours by four-wheel-drive pickup truck on drenched dirt roads with four police officers riding in the back through kilometer after endless kilometer of cattle pasture clearly converted recently from primary tropical forest. The cows munched grass that had grown up among the charred stumps of massive trees that once formed a canopy over this vast terrain dotted by wetlands and savanna. Though the radio station was tuned to a popular rock/salsa/reggaeton station, whose name translated to “Mahogany 94.5,” all the mahogany trees, and tropical cedars, had long since been cut down along the entire route. Read more »

LA PASADITA, Guatemala — The signs were all there: tree stumps, hastily constructed barbed-wire fences and stray cattle. All that was missing was the perpetrator — or perpetrators — of this all too common environmental crime.

About 45 hectares of forestland had been burned, replaced by corn plots and tall grasses, with a few cattle scattered about. About 50 head of cattle congregated around an artificial watering hole.
Officials said they arrested the men they believed to be responsible for this unauthorized land-use change, but they were out of jail on administrative supervision. They face long prison terms if convicted. Read more »

It’s the last leg of our journey back from Guatemala and I marvel at the difference in the landscape from above — houses neatly dotted against the foothill ridges and valleys of California’s sloping red terrain inching all the way from Los Angeles in random sproutings of civilization. It’s the same feeling I had while staring out at the Pacific from Playa Del Rey today — kids ran from the onrush of crashing waves and boogie borders chased their boards, only to bounce on them within an inch of a quick slide beneath their feet. Five hours away is Guatemala City, chaotic, sprawling and a nightmare in city planning (if there actually was ever any real planning behind the city’s massive overpopulation during the some 36 years of war). Read more »

I finally got to see more of Guatemala by land yesterday. I left Flores, Petén, with Kara and Nadia at 6 a.m. Hector, our friend and driver, was behind the wheel and we headed south for hours on straight roads passing more treeless land than I had seen my entire time in Guatemala. The vast rainforest that remains to the north has long ago been transformed into great open tracts of multi-use land. Houses line the roads, roofs are tiled or metal-covered rather than thatched. The livestock grazing in the fields are larger and meatier, the car traffic is denser.

Soon after leaving Petén the road joins with the main east-west corridor, an overland connection between Guatemala’s coasts. Read more »

As the sun emerges from the gray-brown smog that hangs over Guatemala City’s wet streets, we board our plane and are inundated by the sounds of English words, and babies crying — for the most part a universal language of frustration.

Our time here is ended (for now) and I point the Blackberry in different directions while on the plane with the hopes that I’ll be able to send at least one text or one blog entry while in the clouds. Read more »

UAXACTÚN, Guatemala — Everyone in this village down a muddy, rutted road, 23 km past the world-famous Maya archaeological site of Tikal, knows how to “xatear.”

The verb, which would stump most Guatemalans, means “to cut xate,” a decorative plant used in floral arrangements in the United States and elsewhere. Read more »

Our Future of Petén multimedia team has been searching the Flores, Guatemala area for lumber workers to tell us their story. Today we found a few and broke that Flores lassitude fade into the distance.